At The Drive-In: ‘We’re back to being a gang’

"When At The Drive-In signed with a major label, there were people saying 'they sold out' and I'm like 'No! We didn't sell out. This was the plan'," says the band's drummer Tony Hajjar. "The plan was to be on a label that could push our name and if it's a major label or a big indie label or any indie label then we will take it."

At their peak, ATDI were competing with the nu-metal sounds of Linkin Park and Korn and the typical rock star behaviours of The Strokes, fitting in with neither group. With a punk-rock outlook, thrashing noises and deeply political, sometimes overly intellectual lyrics, their wave of carnage was a breath of fresh air but, despite sticking to the success plan, when ATDI called it quits in 2001, personalities were bristled and apologies were left unsaid.

In the 17-year break between their groundbreaking third album, Relationship in Command and last year's in•ter a•li•a, Hajjar, Cedric Bixler, Omar Rodríguez, Paul Hinojos and Jim Ward paired off in twos and threes to separately  form the Mars Volta and Sparta, reuniting as ATDI in 2011 only to disband again in 2012.

Once more, personalities were bristled but apologies began to surface, eventually leading up to their reunion in 2016, with Ward stepping down as guitarist and Sparta member Keeley Davis stepping in.

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“In all relationships, if you’re not communicating and you’re not growing and you’re not forgiving, then you’re not doing anything correctly. When At The Drive-In decided to get back together, it was about moving forward. It was about remembering our past and learning from it,” says the 43-year-old, from his home in Los Angeles, who was in Sparta with Ward and Davis.

“It was about communicating to not letting old issues happen . . . That there’s growth within musical elements and that everyone can express themselves in everything we’ve learned over all the years. And when we made that commitment to each other, it was an easy move.”

High school fair

ADTI's story began in 1994 when Ward and Bixler played together at a high school fair in El Paso, Texas. Hajjar, Hinojos and Rodríguez joined the line-up in 1996, shortly after the release of the their debut album, Acrobatic Tenement, which cost $600 to record. Already a touring band, their commitment to ATDI was strong, with nine-hour practice sessions kicking off at 7.30am every day and each member investing everything they had into the group. As big players in El Paso's DIY scene, their dedication to success is something that would often leave them hungry and Hajjar wonders if online promotion has cut down the actual labour of being in a band.

“It’s different now. Sometimes I make these calculations in my head that – I’m not on social media that much but I try to be. A band could have as many followers as my band or other bands and they’re playing to 50 people and I always think that’s insane. That connection to me is very strange because it doesn’t really translate,” he says. “I know bands that have 30,000 followers and they’re playing to a small amount of people every night.”

On a roll with this topic, he refers to that personality-bristling commitment that led ATDI to success. “When people ask: ‘how did you do it?’, I just say ‘Well, I quit my job, I saved money and I went on tour. Then I came back, I got another job, saved that money and went back on tour until the band was paying me to be on tour’. That’s how I did it. That’s how we all did it. We suffered and we weren’t worried about how many people follow us, we were worried about what we were going to eat that day.”

One of the biggest differences, he says, between now and when ATDI started is the role that social media has to play when you’re promoting new music. “I can’t relate to people that are just posting online about how great they are as musicians but really have not done anything and not gone on the road and not really sweat through it all. Not saying everybody but I’m saying that I have noticed that.

“We still use it as a tool but we also like to be a mystery. That’s a big see-saw effect. It’s like, you know, we’re not the guys that tell you every emotion we’re going through every, single day. It’s just not us,” he says. “With mystery, you can kind of keep people guessing and we don’t push all these surprises. When we’re ready to tell you, we tell you and that’s really about it. There’s something cool about a band being a little bit mysterious.” Catching how seriously he was taking himself, he throws in that he’s guilty for posting about his kids’ birthdays, just like everybody else.

Respect

In the new age of ATDI, there are four things that Hajjar continuously brings up; communication, respect, forgiveness and trust. This is a band that has worked through intergroup tensions, egos, deaths of family members and friends, drug use, exhaustion and a propelled fame that saw the group perform the chaotic One Armed Scissor on Jools Holland in 2000, leaving Holland's next guest Robbie Williams very confused.

“Even when we were younger, we still had this big respect for each other but we didn’t know how to communicate it. And now with all these moving parts and people doing all these things, now you say: ‘Oh, I can take the backseat on this because you’re good at this and I’m not going to say something just to say something’,” he says. “When you have upmost trust in your bandmates, it’s a constant moving train and if you can trust your bandmates in their role, then it’s very easy to do.”

He mentions that without their support during the recording of Relationship in Command, he may not be alive today. Produced by Ross Robinson, who discovered post-hardcore groups such as like Glassjaw, The Blood Brothers and, eh, Limp Bizkit, the creation of this album was incredibly tough on the group. When they were recording Invalid Litter Department, a song about the unsolved murders of women at the Mexican border, Robinson told them to imagine that the kick drum was the heartbeat of all the world's missing mothers. More specifically, he told Hajjar to think of his mother who died when he was just 14 years old. With the clarity of hindsight, how does he feel about Robinson's techniques now?

“He got stuff out of us that was awesome and he did a great job of getting our live sound onto the record but he was also going through some things and . . . he kind of used it as his way of venting and he almost broke me,” he says, suggesting that it’s taken him a long time to be able to open up about this. “So my personal stance is that I would personally never do that to another human being. I was naive at that point. I dare anyone to try to do that to me now. You’re naive, you’re working with a producer, you’ve just signed to a major label and you have money to spend on recording and I was . . . I didn’t want to ruin anything for my band mates.”

‘Fought for me’

“Luckily for my amazing band mates, all four of them, they pulled me out of a hole and they fought for me and because of them I am here now and I have more confidence than I’ve ever had in my life.”

However, he says that skill of tapping into emotions as raw as that hasn’t left him, so much that Rich Costey, who co-produced 2016’s in•ter a•li•a with Rodríguez, asked him during a particularly loud recording session “What are you guys still so angry about?” With issues like sexual assault, police brutality, racism and fascism working their way onto their new material, there’s plenty for ATDI to be angry about and that anger gets its release onstage, instead of with each other.

"We've been that band where you might have heard our music and not liked it but you connected when you see us live. You see that it has always been raw emotion and I get to continue to say that it is still raw emotion," he says a few weeks before their in•ter a•li•a tour comes to Ireland. "We only give it our all and if we're not giving our all, you see that. It's not just this pre-prepared show or a TV dinner."

With a new album that picked up from where Relationship of Command left off in 2000 and this year's Diamanté EP added to their catalogue, this new united front of At The Drive-In is something that Hajjar would never have dreamed of in 2001. So what makes this reunion different to 2012's attempt?

“2012 was us sticking our feet in the water. We purposefully only built 10 shows just to see how it went. And we weren’t all there. Omar had just lost his mother. It was a crazy time. Our emotions were up and down, everyone was still kind of feeling each other out and now we’re doing it,” he chuffs, bringing up communication, respect, forgiveness and trust again.

“We’re back to being a gang. We’re back to being a team.”

 At The Drive-In play Vicar Street, Dublin, July 10th http://www.atthedriveinmusic.com/